Séminaire : Brown Bag Economics of Innovation Seminar
Adresse : Collège de France, 3 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris
Brown Bag Economics of Innovation Seminar
Séminaire
Présence Sur place
Ce séminaire est co-organisé par le Centre de l’Innovation du Collège de France, PSE et l’INSEAD. Il a lieu le vendredi matin sur le site du Collège de France au 5 rue d’Ulm (75005).
Ce séminaire porte principalement sur l’économie de l’innovation, mais reste ouvert aux travaux portant sur d’autres thématiques (particulièrement en Labor Economics et Public Economics). Il vise à fournir un cadre convivial dans lequel des recherches en cours peuvent être discutées de façon informelle. Le séminaire est prioritairement consacré aux présentations de chercheurs et doctorants affiliés au Centre de l’Innovation du Collège de France, à PSE, ou à l’INSEAD mais il accueille également des présentations de chercheurs externes.
Si vous souhaitez faire une présentation au cours de l’année et réserver une date, vous pouvez contacter Claudia Nobile (claudia.nobile@psemail.eu), Luc Paluskiewicz (luc.paluskiewicz@psemail.eu) et Raphaël Wargon (raphael.wargon@psemail.eu).
Dates d’événements multiples
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Crowding Out Long-Term Corporate Investment: The Role of Long-Term Government Debt Supply
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Using large, plausibly exogenous shocks to the maturity structure of U.S. government debt, I provide causal evidence that the supply of long-term government debt affects the duration of corporate investment. I find that an increase in the supply of long-term government debt causes a crowding-out of long-duration investment, via an increase in long-term discount rates. This crowding-out manifests through reallocations of capital away from long-duration investment towards short-duration investment. Such reallocations occur across industries, within industries across firms and within firms across divisions. Resulting variations in the aggregate duration of investment significantly contribute to fluctuations in aggregate corporate debt maturity. My findings highlight the real effects of policies that influence the net supply of long-term bonds, such as public debt management and central bank quantitative easing or tightening. -
Air connections and innovation: evidence from cross-border patents of Chinese cities
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This paper shows that direct air connectivity promotes and shapes cross-border innovation collaborations. Using unique data on new direct air links connecting Chinese cities to the rest of the world between 1990 and 2014, we find that the introduction of a direct link between a Chinese city and a foreign city increases the number of collaborations between them by 0.5 patents (half a standard deviation of no. of patents) after 10 years on average. The impact does not seem to depend on the number of flights once the air connection is effective, which is consistent with a constraint-unlocking effect rather than variable-cost effect. The increase in the number of patents after direct air connection is only observed when the overlap in working hours between the two connected cities is less than 2 hours. There is no impact as a result of connecting Chinese cities with Asia-Pacific locations with which the overlap in working hours is greater. The impact is stronger for technology classes that are more complex and that involve lab experiments, for which more frequent and in-person interactions may be required, which confirms that cross-border communication costs constitute an important friction to collaboration between inventors. Overall, results suggest that frictions in synchronous communication are a major barrier to innovation collaboration. Direct flights help only when the constraint is temporal distance and incapacity to communicate and work synchronously.
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Transition to Green Technology along the Supply Chain
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Labor Market Concentration and the Emergence of Contractors
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Domestic outsourcing has been increasing over the last two decades. Using French matched employer-employee data, I first document that local labor markets differ in terms of exposure to outsourcing, with low-skilled occupations displaying larger shares of outsourced workers. I then find that outsourcing is positively associated with labor market concentration, measured as Herfindahl-Hirschman indices over both new hires and employment, while it is negatively associated with mean wages. To understand the mechanisms at play, I develop a dynamic search and matching model of a local labor market. I find that in order to have a rise in both outsourcing and labor market concentration, the outsourcing market must display a low degree of competitiveness. This level of competition enables contractors to capture a large share of the labor market. -
This paper investigates how firms adapt their sourcing of clean and dirty inputs in response to changes in climate policy. We use information from the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) to create a new classification of clean and dirty products based on whether they are subject to a domestic or a border carbon tax. We then combine this dataset with French firms’ product-level import data over 2000–2019 and estimate that firms’ propensity to import dirty inputs from non-EU countries increased in the 2010s, reflect ing carbon leakage. A heterogeneous firm model is then used to quantify the impact of changes in firms’ sourcing of clean and dirty inputs given the implementation of a car bon tax and a carbon tariff. The simulated ETS carbon tax scenario is able to match leakage observed in the data and leads to a higher price level and a modest decline in emissions. The scenario that further includes the CBAM carbon tariff reverses carbon leakage at the cost of an additional rise in prices. Overall, household welfare declines because the higher costs associated with the carbon policies outweigh the benefits of reduced emissions.
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This paper examines the distribution of firms across patent and markup spaces. Using patent-matched Compustat data, it documents a rise in patent-type concentration among publicly traded U.S. firms since the mid-1990s. This trend is measured through the Herfindahl index of patent class shares and firms’ patent portfolio similarities. Additionally, the paper identifies a positive relationship between a firm’s markup and its patent type similarity to other firms, a finding that contrasts with standard theories of product differentiation and optimal pricing. To explain this pattern, the paper proposes an alternative mechanism: the simultaneous rise in markups and technological concentration can be understood as the equilibrium response of firm distribution toward high-markup-generating technologies. The analysis builds on Matsuyama and Uschev (2021)’s constant (but differential) price elasticity (CPE) under the H.S.A. demand system, adapting it to the Melitz (2003) model. In this setting, firms, upon entry, draw both a productivity level and a patent vector that determines a unique price elasticity. Both theoretical and quantitative results suggest that an increase in market size (e.g., due to globalization) can drive a greater concentration of similar patent classes and shift the distribution toward high-markup fields.
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Historical Shocks, Human Capital, and Innovation: Lessons from Historical Patents
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The French coal curse: coal mining and productivity in the long run
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This paper argues that there is a negative and sustained impact of exposure to natural resources on productivity, education and industry specialization in the long-run. I first develop a highly stylized model of innovation and industry specialization where the availability of natural resources influences sectoral composition. This model predicts that an exogenous increase in the availability of natural resources is likely to generate over-specialization in the resource-intensive industry which leads to an inefficiently low level of education, in turn, to an inefficiently low level of productivity. I then test these predictions in a newly assembled dataset spanning from 1907 to 2016. Namely, I show that exposure to coal extraction induced a negative and sustained impact both on patenting quantity and on patenting quality in France. Meanwhile, coal extraction also exerted adverse impacts on upper-tail education as well as on industry specialization. The persistence of this negative effect might be accounted for by a myopic behavior, whereby firms and households living in departments abundantly endowed with coal failed to diversify in other industries. -
You Only Weave Twice. Industrial Espionage and Economic Growth in XIX Century France
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Can state-sponsored industrial espionage promote innovation and lead to self-sustained growth? We study the effect of 18th century French industrial espionage activity on French innovation and industrial activity in the XIX century. Between 1730 and 1800 the French Bureau of Commerce promoted an ambitious plan aimed at stealing from Britain the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution, bribing British entrepreneurs and inventors to leave England and bring their expertise to France. We assemble a novel database with a comprehensive list of French espionage activity between 1730-1800 and combine it with newly-digitized 17th 18th century industrial surveys, 1800s industrial censuses, and the full list of early French patents. We find large, positive, and persistent effects of industrial espionage on industrial activity and innovation. -
We leverage recent advances in NLP to construct measures of workers’ task exposure to AI and machine learning technologies over the 2010 to 2023 period that vary across firms and time. Using a theoretical framework that allows for a labor-saving technology to affect worker productivity both directly and indirectly, we show that the impact on wage earnings and employment can be summarized by two statistics. First, labor demand decreases in the average exposure of workers’ tasks to AI technologies; second, holding the average exposure constant, labor demand increases in the dispersion of task exposures to AI, as workers shift effort to tasks that are not displaced by AI. Exploiting exogenous variation in our measures based on pre-existing hiring practices across firms, we find empirical support for these predictions, together with a lower demand for skills affected by AI. Overall, we find muted effects of AI on employment due to offsetting effects: highly-exposed occupations experience relatively lower demand compared to less exposed occupations, but the resulting increase in firm productivity increases overall employment across all occupations.
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Faster Markets, Slower Growth: Consumers’ Attention, Market Shares and Competition in R&D
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Using data from U.S. public caompanies over recent decades, we document a paradox: while prospective market leaders have gained market share at an increasing speed, overall turnover in leadership has slowed. Although the dynamism of market shares suggests more contestable markets, the persistence of leadership indicates the opposite. We address this puzzle with a model of endogenous growth, where improved consumer access to market data accelerates market share dynamics and increases firms’ incentives to innovate. Greater competition enhances R&D productivity but also amplifies the misallocation of knowledge production. Consequently, innovation occurs through larger but less frequent spikes. Our model aligns with the data, predicting higher market concentration, increased markups, reduced turnover, and slower growth, even alongside more dynamic market shares and higher R&D spending. Ultimately, the paper shifts attention from insufficient competition in the goods market to inefficient competition in the R&D sector as a potential driver of secular fall in aggregate productivity.
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Stifling or Scaling? Start-up Acquisitions and Their Effect on Innovation
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Over the past two decades, incumbent firms have increasingly acquired innovative start-ups. Against a backdrop of rising industry concentration, declining business dynamism, and fewer disruptive innovations, this trend raises significant policy concerns. However, the studies analysing the effect of acquisitions on start-up innovation remain limited. This paper uses a unique firm-level cross-country dataset to examine the relationship between start-up acquisitions and their innovation performance across 60 countries. The findings indicate that acquisition targets are highly innovative before the deal, and acquirors are generally innovation-oriented firms. The acquired start-ups are also technologically closer to and tend to share industries and countries with their acquirors, indicating potential for technological and product market synergies. However, start-up patenting tends to decline post-acquisition, with no compensating increase in the acquirors’ innovation activity. In addition, the paper provides suggestive evidence about the mechanisms driving this result, pointing to an anti-competitive strategy of the acquiror. -
Talent Flows and the Geography of Knowledge Production: Evidence from Multinational Firms
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with D. Bahar, P. Choudhury, J. Sappenfield. Leveraging a unique dataset merging patent data with all work-related migration reforms that took place in 15 countries over 26 years, we show that reforms discouraging inventor mobility decrease the patenting of MNE subsidiaries within a country, while reforms encouraging it have a positive but much smaller effect. Additionally, reforms attracting mobile inventors to the U.S., India, Japan and Korea decrease innovation in other countries, highlighting the existence of a global competition for talent. Finally, we find that policies easing migration have facilitated about one fourth of the shift in global innovation toward emerging markets.
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3 Rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris, France Île-de-France